I was a computer programmer from about 1970 to 75 when I had to stop work when my daughter was born. I really enjoyed if. I was an assembler programmer but also occasionally used Cobol and Fortran. The company I worked for had 2 huge machines that each nearly took up a whole floor of the building that was built as a bridge of the road. They were a whopping 56k (36bit words so bigger than a 56k IBM)! Not that long after I left I bought a ZX81 in smiths and carried it home in my shopping bag, underneath the bridge with the two big computers and laughed to myself! I agree with everything you've said.
Thanks Louise. "A whopping 56k"! Great stuff. Interesting how we, of a certain age, have experienced this sense of massive progress from nothing to phones (computers) whose power dwarfs those whopping beasts of the past, yet youth of today experience only small, incremental progress like an extra camera or higher resolution.
I certainly remember that ZX81. The clear potential of computers was but one element of the the unbridled optimism of those days. And yes, by then it had been 14 years since the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey with it's the promise of routine interplanetary travel in our lifetime. The ZX81 and the Spectrum were proof that it was all coming true!
I remember when you just said, "oh, I've got a computer" and went and got it- what a surprise! First one I had ever seen. That interplanetary travel has come true in a way but not for people. I still find it hard to believe that we can send a vehicle to rendevous with a comet, land on it and bring a bit back...mad. But the latest failures to get moon landings right shows its still all a bit fragile.
Thanks for this trip down memory lane, Chris. I struggled through a week of learning ALGOL in 1970 as part of my science degree, but unlike you the feedback loop defeated me and I never got the program to run. The worst bit was dropping the punched card stack so never sure I got it back in the right order! But it didn’t put me off a career in software development, which included working on migrating data from one health system to the ‘shiny’ new ones as part of the NHSIT programme. One of my first jobs was with a DEC computer (PDP8 with a whole 8k memory!) which had loads of toggle switches and flashing lights on the front, but which had to be booted with a 12 inch length of punched paper tape. Luckily I never did have to discover whether there was a backup piece of tape.....
Thanks Christine- how things have changed, eh? Sorry the feedback loop was too long- dropping the punched card stack-What a disaster! That zx81 blew my mind, just being able to type “run” and there you were, or rather, often as not you weren’t but at least it informed you what line the error was at, even if you had to then work out what the error actually was. I graduated to an Acorn Electron, not being able to afford the BBC micro but with the addition of a Plus 1 (printer interface) and later a Plus 3 (3.5 inch floppy- unbelievably advanced for the time) and a dot matrix printer ( cost more than the micro!) I wrote and printed out my first novel on it!
I was a computer programmer from about 1970 to 75 when I had to stop work when my daughter was born. I really enjoyed if. I was an assembler programmer but also occasionally used Cobol and Fortran. The company I worked for had 2 huge machines that each nearly took up a whole floor of the building that was built as a bridge of the road. They were a whopping 56k (36bit words so bigger than a 56k IBM)! Not that long after I left I bought a ZX81 in smiths and carried it home in my shopping bag, underneath the bridge with the two big computers and laughed to myself! I agree with everything you've said.
Thanks Louise. "A whopping 56k"! Great stuff. Interesting how we, of a certain age, have experienced this sense of massive progress from nothing to phones (computers) whose power dwarfs those whopping beasts of the past, yet youth of today experience only small, incremental progress like an extra camera or higher resolution.
I certainly remember that ZX81. The clear potential of computers was but one element of the the unbridled optimism of those days. And yes, by then it had been 14 years since the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey with it's the promise of routine interplanetary travel in our lifetime. The ZX81 and the Spectrum were proof that it was all coming true!
(Btw, Hal is the tag on my ChatGPT bookmark)
Atb,
Wolfy.
I remember when you just said, "oh, I've got a computer" and went and got it- what a surprise! First one I had ever seen. That interplanetary travel has come true in a way but not for people. I still find it hard to believe that we can send a vehicle to rendevous with a comet, land on it and bring a bit back...mad. But the latest failures to get moon landings right shows its still all a bit fragile.
Thanks for this trip down memory lane, Chris. I struggled through a week of learning ALGOL in 1970 as part of my science degree, but unlike you the feedback loop defeated me and I never got the program to run. The worst bit was dropping the punched card stack so never sure I got it back in the right order! But it didn’t put me off a career in software development, which included working on migrating data from one health system to the ‘shiny’ new ones as part of the NHSIT programme. One of my first jobs was with a DEC computer (PDP8 with a whole 8k memory!) which had loads of toggle switches and flashing lights on the front, but which had to be booted with a 12 inch length of punched paper tape. Luckily I never did have to discover whether there was a backup piece of tape.....
Thanks Christine- how things have changed, eh? Sorry the feedback loop was too long- dropping the punched card stack-What a disaster! That zx81 blew my mind, just being able to type “run” and there you were, or rather, often as not you weren’t but at least it informed you what line the error was at, even if you had to then work out what the error actually was. I graduated to an Acorn Electron, not being able to afford the BBC micro but with the addition of a Plus 1 (printer interface) and later a Plus 3 (3.5 inch floppy- unbelievably advanced for the time) and a dot matrix printer ( cost more than the micro!) I wrote and printed out my first novel on it!